TCO London Huck 71A

Speak No Evil review – an effective game of cat and mouse

Review by David Jenkins @daveyjenkins

Directed by

James Watkins

Starring

James McAvoy Mackenzie Davis Scoot McNairy

Anticipation.

It’s a remake of a well-loved Danish original.

Enjoyment.

Well-oiled, well-played, at points gruesomely entertaining, but not massively revelatory.

In Retrospect.

Could McAvoy have found his calling as the intimidating screen ghoul du jour?

James McAvoy is a blast as the overly-friendly patriarch who invites unwitting tourists back to his west country stack for fun and games.

One minute they’re your bezzie mates, they’re getting in the pints, wrapping you up in an asphyxiating bear-hug, inviting you over to hang out with the fam, and the next… well, they’re showing you that all their pretences were false, and then some. Speak No Evil is a carefully Xeroxed English language remake of Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 film of the same name, with some of its more bleakly unpalatable edges softened for the broader tastes of the multiplex set.

Riffing on the clinical bourgeois evisceration of Michael Haneke’s unwatchable 1997 classic, Funny Games, this sees a US expat family in Tuscany on their holidays fall under the spell of the ultra-charismatic Paddy (James McAvoy), a West Country doctor (so he claims) with the ability to light up any room he enters. Along with his doting, kindly wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and tongueless son Ant (Dan Hough), they make for the perfect, refreshing holiday hook-up: no airs; self-aware; sufficiently chill; and worldly enough to suggest a deeper emotional bond could be forged.

Back in rain-sodden London, Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis) decide to take daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) to visit Paddy’s country pile for a long weekend of cider, shooting and, as it transpires, extreme discomfort and humiliation. The film is canny in making you wait before it allows the inevitable penny to drop, and this is another of a cycle of films in which well-to-do middle-class outsiders are made to reflect deeply on their own petty hypocrisies before they’re allowed any type of respite.

The film’s pronounced genre roots serve to denigrate some of its power as a social satire, and it’s too clear that there’s something up with Paddy and his brood long before we see Ant’s desperate attempts to signal that there’s danger up ahead. McNairy and Davis serve their purpose of looking bemused and aloof, while McAvoy is allowed to chomp on the scenery as the jacked confidence man in the guise of a chummy country squire.

It’s not saying or doing much that we haven’t seen before, but it plays its well-known cat-and-mouse game very effectively, and McAvoy in particular employs the micro inflections of body language to tease the late-game volte face. There’s definitely some humour here too, such as a sequence in which Paddy blasts out The Bangles’ ‘Eternal Flame’ while driving Ben out to cull some foxes, and there are some very on-the-money observations about the surreal existential value of cuddly toys to children. But the final act seems happy to lean on cranky character motivations and silly backstory as a way to just let the fireworks do what they do best.

It’s interesting to see the Blumhouse factory line deliver a remake that’s a little more off-kilter and adult-oriented than the norm, and it’ll be interesting to see if genre fans are disappointed by how much of this film plays like straight drama. But Watkins’ slick direction and McAvoy’s frankly terrifying performance make this an effective, worthy if not essential entry into the “If you go out to the woods today…” creepy canon.

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